Challenges to integrate health impact assessment into environmental assessment procedures: the pending debate

Sooner or later, Health Impact Assessment (HIA) will be conducted as a legal requirement (instead of a voluntary process) in a variable number of public and/or private projects worldwide. The Spanish Public Health Act 2011 introduced HIA into the national legal system but its regulatory development remains incomplete. This delay is partially justified because of the current lack of resources and the associated costs, which are not exclusively a Spanish problem, according to literature. Therefore, this situation invites stakeholders to promote the integration of HIA into other administrative consolidated procedures, such as strategic environmental assessment (SEA) of policies, plans and programmes and environmental impact assessment (EIA) of projects. However, SEA and EIA procedures unveil well-known weaknesses that have been publicly reported for decades. It is, therefore, befitting to promote a previous interdisciplinary debate on both the desirability of integrating HIA into both SEA and EIA, and the way of doing so. This article intends to serve as a starting point for discussion by practitioners involved in defining the role of HIA into environmental assessments and vice versa.